The Weight of the World

 

The book of Job tells the story of one guy who loses it all. But the power of the story seems to presume that his tale will be useful for all of us. Job, as Kierkegaard tells it in a newly released collection “Spiritual Writings,” experiences a loss that we can all learn from.

All around me I seem to encounter a sense of entitlement people have about their place with the world’s fortunes. Job would laugh at these people, but not too snidely. Kierkegaard notes the serenity of Job’s character by emphasizing one line from the book. It’s after Job sees that his house has collapsed. I don’t know if this is before or after the warts, of being debased in the eyes of the community or before or after his wife tells asks him matter of factly, “Why don’t you just kill yourself?”

What Job offers is this: “The Lord gave, the Lord took away, blessed be the name of the Lord.”

This utterance astonishes Kierkegaard because Job “remembers that the lord ‘gave’ at a moment of deepest despair. His soul is not broken by grief’s dumb oppresiveness.

It’s useful to think of the grief that befalls us as dumb and inferior to our human capacities for will, endurance and understanding. Implicit in the story of Job is that we can control how we see the world and we will weather its unreasonable demands. Also implied is the fact that Job had no regrets about how he had lived his life. And this we can learn from as well.

“He remembered with gratitude that his feet had not strayed from the path of righteousness, that he had rescued the poor who complained to him and the fatherless who had no helper, and even in the moment the ‘blessing of those who are abandoned’ was upon him as before…”

If indeed our President is doing his best to make universal health care moral and national imperative, one would be impressed by the lengths he’s gone to extend political capital in this direction even under the stress of a global economy in somersaults, incessant attacks from the press, indeed the weight of the world. The blessing of those who were abandoned (see his friends in Altgeld Gardens Chicago) is perhaps still with him as before. And that blessing will sustain a person even at a time such as now when hard line lefties are calling him a closet Republican.

Terror rolls over me, pursues my path like the wind. . . .

At night my limbs are pierced, and my sinews know no rest.

With great power he seizes my garment, grabs hold of me at the collar.

He hurls me into the muck, and I become like dust and ashes

The journalist Jon Meacham was the first person to connect Job and the modern presidency for me. And he does so eloquently here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/21/books/review/Meacham-t.html

 Maybe in another time, but probably not, we could interpret Job’s troubles as an allegory for our time right now. But with the distractions of niceties, this narrative is harder to see. And the economy and good feeling continue to plunge in the face of our continually effervescent delusions.

Meacham himself probably had to go through some hardship to see the connection. Like Job, he was once the child of fortune. He was heralded a boy wonder journalist right of college. He was one of the youngest editors in Newsweek history. But when the news cycle completely changed, the demands on him were outsized, and he was ousted from the magazine amid dwindling subscribers and readers. This experience will no doubt take him out of the princely perspective of the wonder boy and into the eyes of the tested. And I think something of that experience, and his knowledge on his subjects in general were the makings of this curiously spiritual book review. 

 Kierkegaard: “Those who have fought the good fight, experienced wretchedness understand [Job’s] saying and, even if he or she never speaks about it, interpret it more gloriously than those who spend a lifetime explaining it. 

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